Havana Heartbreak

"There are no borders in this struggle to the death. We cannotbe indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, becausevictory by any country over imperialism is our victory, just as anycountry's defeat is a defeat for all of us."--Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, addressingthe Organization of Afro-Asian Solidarity

"Get a load of the ass on that girl!"--Cuban tourist A.J. Benza, addressing hisNew York City buddies

Hemingway knew. Big Papa wasn't the first guy to hop a plane to Havana and drink his mojito in La Bodeguita del Medito and his daiquiri at El Floridita, but he was smart enough to know there was something different about the Caribbean sweet spot 90 miles south of Key West. Maybe it was as simple as Cuba being the perfect spot for a man to write. Pull up a bar stool, watch the pretty girls go by and wait for the words to come.

Maybe it was Fidel Castro and his trustworthy soldier Che Guevara who discovered the sweaty seduction and unchained lust that courses through the island's women. Did the Cuban guerrilla revolution, which started high in the Sierra Maestras in 1956--and which led to the overthrow of President Fulgencio Batista three years later--begin because a couple of guys just wanted to get laid? It's not hard to imagine.

Perhaps it began before all the bloodshed, even before President Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill. Before the Spanish flag was replaced by the British flag and replaced again by the Spanish flag before finally being taken down for today's Cuban flag. Maybe Christopher Columbus knew something when he first spotted the luxuriant crescent-shaped island and called it the most beautiful island he had ever seen. Why? What is it about this land that has had men landing on it for five centuries with nothing but conquest on their minds?

I wanted to find out. So some 500 years after the Italian explorer found her, four of my Italian buddies and I left the self-absorbed women of New York City and descended on the island to find something for ourselves, to maybe claim parts of her as our own.

Among my crew, one took along his girlfriend for the adventure, while one left his girl back home in the States. Two were single men on the prowl. And a fifth was making his second trip to Cuba in the hopes of getting some information on a jinetera--a prostitute--whom he had met the previous year and fell in love with after a three-day tumble. The last time he saw her she was being dragged off a beach by a policeman, unable to speak. He spent a good part of our trip with tears in his eyes.

(continued on page 140)Havana (continued from page 111)

It's important to confess that most of my trips to Cuba have been illegal. That is to say, I am an American citizen and have only gotten permission from the U.S. State Department to travel there once. I was never part of a sponsored research group, professional conference, sanctioned religious group, cultural exchange, humanitarian voyage, whatever. Those aren't for me. Most of my trips were spur of the moment and spiritual. I remember white-knuckling it all the way through the early-morning echoes of Newark International Airport to the confusing transfer in Montego Bay or Cancún and through the sterile, marble-floored José Marti Airport in Cuba and, finally, back home to John F. Kennedy and U.S. Customs.

I had heard all the stories before I left: my wary friends (who were worried I might lose my passport), my family (who feared I'd be paying a heavy fine), my lawyer (who warned that jail time would not be out of the question if I ran into a customs official who really wanted to break balls). But I also heard stories from other pals who waltzed right past officials in Jamaica or Mexico, tucked a $20 bill in their passports and politely asked the customs agent, "Por favore, no stampa."

And just like that, they got in. And when they got back home, they had nothing but beautiful, ball-aching stories to tell. Fuck my passport, you can have my passport: I wanted to be the guy telling the stories.

I only mention this as evidence that Cuba's magic is worth living through the drumbeat of danger and desire that has played inside me ever since my first visit.

Let me hit you with this vision: A bright, hot Havana day is now an electric evening. The sounds of Perez Prado's Perfidia play from an open window. The song is something you rolled your eyes at when Lawrence Welk performed it. But tonight, with the darkeyed beauty smiling back at you and all your American enthusiasm and wonder--as she leans against the back bumper of a 1958 Chevy--it is the single best fucking song you have ever heard in your life. You turn a corner and there is more music. An open window obscured by a mighty mango tree offers you the sadness and solitude of Omara Portuondo singing Veinte Años, begging her lover to feel the same way he felt for her 20 years ago. As the song filters to the street, another statuesque beauty--this one with skin the color of coffee--stands proud and smiles at you while her daughter slides down the cracked sidewalk on a single Rollerblade. You wonder, How could any man leave a Cuban woman high and dry for 20 years? When you stop to snap a picture, you offer the beautiful mother a dollar (which she turns down immediately) and the little girl poses. At six years old, she is smart enough to turn her body from you, wipe the curls from her sweaty forehead and fix her jumpsuit just right. And you marvel at the beauty and irony of it all. Here is Cuba, a nation with no pot to piss in and no window to toss it out. At the same time, the women--from six to 60--are welcoming you to bathe in their spirit, their life and their longing. And you find yourself obliging.

Within a few hours of landing in Havana, we found ourselves cramped and standing at the tiny bar of a dive the locals call Johnny's. (They say "Yonni's.") It's only 10 p.m., but already the place is up and running. The ratio of women to men is about 11 to 1.

Women are not allowed to walk unaccompanied into one of the handful of high-end nightclubs in Havana, but they can visit a dive bar like Johnny's. And here, everyone is on the same mission: Every woman needs to find a man and every man is waiting for a woman to find him.

It didn't take more than three minutes before the five of us felt like the Beatles landing at Shea Stadium. A girl's hand squeezed my biceps, another grabbed my buddy's ass, another bent forward to actually plant kisses on the back of my already sweaty guayabera while a pack of five beckoned us onto the dance floor. Ernesto, a Cuban pal, told me most of these girls will sleep with a man as part of the bargaining process that gets them into a nightclub. Walk out the door with her, hang your arm over her shoulder and whisper in her ear so that the cops on the corner believe you are an actual couple. Then do your negotiating in the back of a 1954 Buick on the way to Macumba or Comodoro.

A night of sin comes cheap in Havana. It'll run you anywhere from $60 to $100, depending on the girl and how well you salsa. Make her sweat and she might shave off a few bucks. If you can hop the language barrier and legitimately groove with a girl, it might only cost you a dinner and a few Cuba libres. Sex for nothing isn't out of the question, either. The beautiful thing about Cuban women, unlike a lot of our American women, is this: Love, not money, is the drug.

Back at Johnny's, I took in the pulsating sounds of the disco, the countless beautiful women in halter tops and stretch pants and the flushed faces of the male tourists anxious to begin negotiating before the sweat on their first Cristal beer has dried. One thing to remember: Unlike America and Europe, Cuba is not stuck on recreational drugs. Ernesto tells me that Castro is so hard on drugs and drug users that scoring is almost impossible. For locals, he says, getting caught with a $30 wrap of coke is as bad as being charged with moving 30 kilos. Many of the girls we spoke to had never even heard of X, let alone used it on a regular basis. The stink of a joint never permeates the night air. In Cuba, you're more apt to find rooms smelling of rum, fried food, cheap perfume, diesel fuel, cigars, ocean salt and sex.

The DJ spun Britney Spears--our cue to bolt. I didn't come all these miles and risk having my passport revoked to hear Oops, I Did It Again. The Americanization of Cuba is happening, I said to myself. What the fuck is next?

Before we split from Johnny's, I grabbed a pretty little thick-lipped jinetera named Nellie and begged her, "Show me the real Cuba, mommy." Nellie downed my Cuba libre for me, slung my arm over her bare shoulder and whistled for her identical twin sisters to follow. Our driver revved up the convertible Buick and our sweaty bodies piled in.

"How does it feel to be--how you say?--the Rolling Stones?" asked Nesto, the driver we hired.

"Oh, Nesto," I said. "Does it get any better than this?"

"It will."

"It will?"

"Sí, my friend, sí."

"I take you to Macumba now," Nellie whispered.

As Nesto drove, suddenly we were behind the Iron Curtain, cruising on highways dotted with billboards of Che Guevara proclaiming: "Patria o Muerte" (Our country or death!). It was 90 degrees at midnight. I had a pretty girl by my side and I hadn't been out of New York five hours yet.

•

Forget about geography. Havana is a small town in much the same way that everyone knows everyone's business in Hollywood, Soho, South Beach, Paris, you name it. Like the relic buildings that dot the landscape there, reputations in Havana are easy to build and almost impossible to ruin. That's why it is important not to be seen too often in the company of a jinetera. If only because you will one day hear about it from the Cuban woman of your dreams.

So, even though my visits with jineteras were (ahem) for the purpose of this article, I was careful not to keep them at the house too long. One young girl was mesmerized by the products in my medicine cabinet. After a lengthy discussion on why the women of Cuba are so lusty, she was inclined to leave with a bunch of my Aveda products rather than the agreed-upon fee of $50. Another was desperate for a few of my U2 CDs, and after a mild struggle, I parted with Achtung Baby and Rattle and Hum but drew the line at Joshua Tree. But what they left me with was well worth my material losses.

One girl called Usnavy (named that way because of her mom's vision of U.S. Navy ships while she was a child in Guantanamo Bay) told me Cuban women are the most beautiful and lustful because of their situation. "Maybe we are beautiful because we are, how you say, almost extinct? That we dying?" the 18-year-old beauty said. "Like a rose is most beautiful the day before the bloom bows."

Let me know when you hear nuggets like that from the 18-year-old cashier at Starbucks.

On one starry night, a sweet jinetera named Kuki (who has two children at home sleeping on mattresses, while she sleeps on a blanket between them) asked me if I could see star-filled skies like these back in New York City. "Sure, we can," I said. "We see this all the time. And we see tall buildings and bridges and tunnels. Don't you ever want to see more than you see now?"

"No," Kuki offered. "I see enough now. To see more is to be greedy."

This is not the same class of women who work at those nasty 1-800-get-laid lines we have in the States. I sat with these women. I lay down with these women. I admit that I basically went to Cuba to conquer a few of these women. But why did I always feel these women were conquering me?

It was inevitable that on each night during one of my trips, my buddies and I would meet in the living room after the jineteras had been given their cab fare and we would tell our tales. Our stories went from being graphically sexual to describing the benign mispronounciations of simple words. Sometimes we debated the impossibility of plain communication versus the common language of pure sex. One girl used to insist on taking a bath before and after lovemaking. Another walked 12 miles to our house the following night and waited at our curb for two hours before we fell out of our car, drunk and disillusioned. Three others insisted on helping us prepare a great meal and party we tossed for the entire town at the close of the Havana Film Festival. They cooked for us, arranged flowers and lit candles. They took ice out of their own glasses when our drinks warmed.

Soon the girls were running our household. The sounds of their voices and laughter were things we looked forward to. I can't speak for every one of my buddies, but the women of Cuba were turning me inside out. I had spent some 25 years talking to girls so I could lie down with them. Suddenly I was lying down with girls just so I could talk to them.

And then I met La China.

The people of Havana call Yoandra Hernandez La China (pronounced "la cheena") because the Chinese third of her heritage slants her eyes enough to distinguish her from the rest of the beauties on the island. She speaks enough English to get you through the night without licking your fingers through a pocket dictionary. We were Lucy and Ricky in reverse. La China is a model. Leave it to me to not be content enough with her friendship. I had to go and flip over her beautiful figure and her thick accent and her fluid sexuality. Despite warnings from my buddies, there was no stopping me from falling in love. Suddenly I was opting for walks along the Malecon with her rather than trips to the disco with the boys. I spent nights holding her hand along the cobblestone streets of Habana Vieja while my pals perfected their rap with the pretty locals.

On my third trip to Cuba, I was bringing her perfume and jewelry and watching her cry to a Billie Holiday lyric while my friends slowly accepted my secession from the ranks of the rowdy tourists. I would land in Havana and watch La China run toward me in the sea of jubilation and heartbreak that personifies a Cuban airport. Then I would kiss her face the entire 16 miles into town.

There was nothing materialistic about La China. A little rum, a little Coca-Cola, some Celia Cruz on the stereo and our sweaty bodies stuck together were an epiphany for her and a dream come true for me. Sometimes she would fall asleep next to me and I would stay awake for hours just staring at her.

Falling in love, or lust, with a woman in Cuba was something I never expected. I have yet to find the feeling in my three years in Hollywood and, a few years ago in New York City, I had to watch the love of my life drift away when my career jerked me away from our Greenwich Village neighborhood to Los Angeles. Negotiating love across 3000 miles and three time zones proved impossible. And yet now I was in love with an amazing woman living in one of the last bastions of communism, in a country I'm technically not allowed to travel to. It was like having a pen pal on the moon.

But still we tried. And sometimes we actually believed that my weeklong visits every three months would hold us over. We packed as much life into that one week as we could, and she was a soldier. On the final night of one visit, La China was stricken with food poisoning at a salsa club and we all watched in concern as her beautiful face began to blow up to horror-film proportions. "I sorry for my monster face," she told our friends while we made our getaway. As one of my Cuban pals tossed me the keys to his BMW and told me to take her to a local hospital, La China insisted on finishing our dance. "She'll tell you the way to go. Tell them she's a tourist or they won't treat her. Now go!"

After she received her shots and the swelling went away and the doctor gave her a sedative, La China was still hellbent on getting back to the salsa club. I insisted on taking her home, but she would have none of it. The lids on her bedroom eyes looked like they had 10-pound weights on them. "But, baby, it's your last night. I need to make more fun for you."

When I steered the car toward her little home, she cried in my lap, convinced she had ruined my night. "Please don't remember me this way."

Can you imagine an American girl acting this way?

Of course, we got past that incident and spent many hours on the phone laughing over it before I returned for my final visit last December. That trip was bittersweet for me. December has been hell since my mom died on Christmas when I was a kid. Now the cruel month was about to take another beauty from my arms.

Meanwhile, my understanding buddies Peppe and Rocco were getting acquainted with the heart and soul of a Cuba I never saw. They took to the streets, hung out with Cubans and accepted invitations into their tiny, cramped homes. They rode buses, visited churches and watched as shirtless neighborhood men replaced their old Ford and Chevy carburetors with Starkist tuna cans and Russian tractor parts.

One elderly and proud couple, Peter and Maria, waved my friends inside to show them Hollywood-style photos of themselves in their youth. In the framed photos--which inexplicably hung alongside images of Mighty Mouse and Mickey Mantle--Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner had nothing on this married pair. In the roofless kitchen, Peter pointed to a blackboard with scribbled English sentences he was teaching himself.

"How has your day been?" said one.

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself," said another.

And finally, "A penny saved is a penny earned."

Peter, in his late 70s, displayed the blackboard as if to show his respect and avid curiosity for Americana as Peppe snapped away. As the boys were about to leave, Rocco squeezed a $20 bill into the old man's hand and Peter broke down in tears and burned a sad farewell into our video camera: "I hope to be alive to see you again in my home one day." The boys assured him he would. But as he shut the door, Peter's tears jumped from his eyes like mercury from a busted thermometer. "These are happy tears," he said as the tape faded out. But they weren't.

And there were days when my other friends dragged the boys to a tiny home in Pinar del Rio, in the hopes of speaking with the busted jinetera's parents and trying to make sense of her arrest and incarceration. The girl's parents told my friend to forget about seeing her ever again. He cried the whole ride back to Havana.

There is an undeniably spooky side to Cuba's bustling single life. One night two beauties sat at our table after the famed show at the Tropicana. Ellie and Carolina--with their tight white dresses--crashed our table and dug their hands into our ice bucket before filling up on heavy doses of seven-year-old Havana Club rum. (Drinkers note: This stuff makes 151 seem like Kool-Aid.) After a few seconds of gyrations at our table, Peppe and Maurizio took the girls for a whirl on the dance floor. An hour later we were all home and the pad echoed with the sounds of drunken men rummaging a refrigerator and more sounds of sex coming from two rooms upstairs.

The next morning, the girls grabbed their belongings and began the negotiating of cash and gifts--which would sadly include soap, CDs, hair gel and high-end shampoo. Then the foursome made their way downstairs and waited for a cab. Before they left, Peppe noticed one of the girls had lifted his Aveda hair oil without his knowledge. As his broken Spanish alerted the older girl of the younger girl's theft, the jineteras engaged in a war of words that bordered on a mother hen disciplining her insubordinate chick. Just as Peppe was about to accept his loss, the elder girl took out a small knife and quickly stuck it into the younger girl's thigh. As we gasped at the widening red spot and tried to stop her, the elder girl did it again. And in her best Spanglish, she explained to us that she was terribly embarrassed at her friend's behavior. "You are guests in our country," she told us. "And you have been gentlemen."

And if this weren't enough, as the older jinetera ran for the honking cab, the younger girl cryptically told us she had placed a curse on the hair oil and it was useless to want it anyway. We shook off the creeps after an hour or so, but on our last evening in that home--as we were packing and leaving things behind for the needy family who lets us stay in their home--Peppe offered the bottle of hair oil to our ecstatic house maid. But just as she went to grab it, the bottle slipped, fell and broke into pieces at the spot where the jineteras had squared off. One of my last visions of Cuba was watching our friend try to scoop up the oil with a Kodak film container and a butter knife. She smiled as she made the ridiculous effort, and I became a quick believer in Cuban black magic.

•

La China was not at the airport waiting for me on my last trip to Cuba, but we did meet at a house party later that night, and the sparks flew like they always had. I arrived a bit high on a bottle of Havana Club rum, and called out her name over the DJ's records. And within seconds I saw La China running toward me. We spent the evening in our own little world of inside jokes, huge promises and the drunken prospect of a possible life together. The night ended with us finishing off a dance alone in a paint-chipped blue stairwell, far from the drunken revelers on the terrace but too close for my comfort to a beautiful guy in a fancy white suit. He kept his eye on us too long for my liking.

"Who's that guy?" I asked her between kisses.

"A photographer friend of mine."

"He likes you, no?"

"I am with you, no?"

She left with me and the guys that night for a wild night at the Tropicana Club, but it still didn't sit right with me.

The week flew by. La China had to work long hours on a photo shoot and seeing me was almost impossible. So my pals and I spent our days downing mojitos at the Hemingway Marina, eating grilled lobster at Santa Maria beach while an old man named Arturo gave us 45-minute full-body massages for seven bucks. We found a scary town where chickens cried in anticipation of being sacrificed by santeros, who were asked to cure locals of their ills. I watched a santero spit a mouthful of rum on an old man's back before he began beating the bird to death across the man's torso. When the rooster finally lay dead for the man's sins, an old woman took my hand and walked away crying. "The man feel better already," she said to me matter-of-factly, as if we'd just watched a doctor prescribe two Tylenols.

On what was to be my final night in Havana, the boys and I tossed a big party in the backyard of the private house we always stay in. We intended to spend every cent of our money, save for the exact amount we would need before we could all make withdrawals at an ATM in Mexico. And that meant all we needed was the $18 airport tax in Cuba as we got on the plane. I promised everyone I would steal jamon y queso sandwiches for us before we boarded. We shook hands and decided to give the town something to talk about.

We cleaned out every flower cart in Havana. We bought cases and cases of Cuba's favorite rum, Havana Club, and an equal amount of Coca-Cola. We packed 20 pounds of ice on two bicycles. An older woman named Ilda roasted a pig for us while her husband, Enrique, tended to huge pots of chicken ajillo and black beans, rice, mojo sauce and yucca. Little girls from the neighborhood strung lights along the yard while little boys played basketball using the hoop we put up in the backyard. We hired a salsa band. Neighbors walked over and serenaded us with Hasta Siempre--the Che Guevara anthem--with their own guitars and maracas. Even some of Cuba's policemen--those ominous and mustachioed tough guys--stopped by, had a bite and a dance and left. Somehow or other we managed to have some of the biggest names in Cuban cinema and music dancing on the patio that night. One old man, who had been sitting shirtless in a rocking chair, took my friend Rocco aside and told him he hadn't had this much fun since the Revolution.

At close to three a.m., there was only one question: Why wasn't La China here to bid me farewell on our last night?

"I hope she's all right," Rocco offered.

"Ah, no big. I'll deal," I shrugged.

But it was big to me. And I couldn't deal.

Later we overheard a girl speaking in hushed tones into a phone in another room. Apparently one of our female friends, Anita, was on the phone with La China. Rocco, who is much more fluent in Spanish than I am, leaned close to the door. I could tell by his face the news wasn't good.

Rocco laid it out like Morse code. "She's with the guy in the white suit. At the Hotel Nacional right now. He's not a photographer. He's a bullfighter from Spain. She says she likes you. A lot. But she's afraid to fall in love with you because of the possibility of rarely seeing you. She doesn't want to live with a broken heart.

"She's crying now," Rocco continued. "The bullfighter means little to her. But he is free to travel to Cuba whenever he wants. She says to please tell you it was simply too hard to face you on your last night."

We all just stood there, drunk and dazed. Our plane would leave in two hours. We were all packed. There was only one thing to do.

"I'm going to the Hotel Nacional," I said. "I gotta see her one last time. I'll see you guys at the airport."

Our driver waited outside while I found La China alone for a moment by the pool. The bullfighter was loudly regaling some men with his tales from the ring.

I sneaked up to her behind a fountain. "You're just gonna forget about me like that, my China?" I said, shocking her to instant tears.

"Oh, no, no, baby," she cried. "I don't mean to not see you." She was rubbing her heart, searching for words, looking over her shoulder. Suddenly there was a language barrier between us.

"Come on, the hell with that guy, you can see him whenever you want. Who knows when you'll see me again?"

We climbed in the car with La China's face buried in my chest as the driver kept his nose on the winding stretches of the Malecon.

For a while we said nothing. I just stroked her hair while she twirled the little ceramic bracelets she bought me in Habana Vieja. I smelled the diesel fumes mixed with the Chanel No. 5 I had brought her on a previous trip.

La China cried and cried.

"You are a young, beautiful woman. Live your life. I am the American who comes here and wishes to see you every three months or so. If you have time, you see me. You let me feel the wind. That's all I can ask of you."

We were both crying now as we kissed in the dark of her doorway. La China closed the security gate to her front door, but before she closed the heavy wooden door, she called me back.

"Baby, sometimes when you are--how you say in English?--persistent, you can catch the wind."

Jesus, they speak in poems, these Cuban women. Hemingway knew.

I got to the airport, jacked a few sandwiches and met the fellas on the plane. I kept them awake the entire flight to Mexico with the painful poetry of it all.

It is foolish to believe a letter sent to Cuba, or letters sent from Cuba to America, will reach the intended person. Only the rich have e-mail and even then, you never know who's reading it in addition to whom you send it to. So the only contact I intended to keep with La China was the same weekly phone call I had been making for the entire year. But the day we arrived home we were met with the news that Castro had cut off phone lines between America and Cuba--because of some AT&T flap--and there was no telling how long that would continue. That meant I was going to be denied even the sound in La China's voice. No more giggles. No more promises. No more calls. To make matters worse, the U.S. Treasury got wind of my illegal trips and heavily fined me for going without permission. It didn't matter that I went to pursue a tragic love--Treasury agents don't keep much Kleenex around. After I paid my fine and my attorney asked when I might be able to get permission to travel there again, the answer was painfully short.

"Tell your client that he went there enough. That's it."

A man can only look at photographs so long before he begins to forget the simple things that kept a woman in his heart. Several weeks after I lost contact with La China, I saw a little Yorkie puppy in the window of a pet shop who just happened to have been born on June 14, which is Che Guevara's birthday. I took that as a sign. I needed a dog like I needed a hole in the head, but I took the puppy home. I named her La China, and now I watch with glee as she fills my house with her nervous energy, tireless spirit and undying loyalty. She is small and full of heart, and her little body shakes with devotion whenever I walk into the house. She also has an overbite. She sleeps at the foot of my bed at night. And she, too, is beautiful in her silence.

Leave it to me not to be content with her friendship. I had to flip over her thick accent and fluid sexuality.